How unique are you based on your gender, date of birth and zip code? Professor Dewri of the DU Computer Science Department has a web tool to estimate the numbers for you based on the 2010 USA Census data. The more unique you are, the easier it can be identify you in the digital realm. What is your score?

Hackers Steal Credit Card Data From Up to 40 Million Target Customers, 12/19/2013, mashable.com
Cybercriminals have hit retail store Target with a massive data breach that may have affected 40 million of customers’ credit and debit cards accounts. The breach started around Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year in America, and has reportedly affected roughly 40,000 card devices at registers in Target locations around the country. … In its press release acknowledging the breach, Target said “40 million credit and debit card accounts may have been impacted between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013.”

The Latest Privacy Risk? Looking Up Medical And Drug Information Online, 02/24/2015, www.databreaches.net
Neil Ungerleider reports: If you have cancer, HIV, diabetes, lupus, depression, heart disease—or you simply look up health-related information online—advertisers are watching you. A new paper on what happens when users search for health information online shows that some of our most sensitive internet searches aren’t as anonymous as we might think.

Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security, 3/22/2014, www.bespacific.com
Ponemon Institute: “…we are releasing our Fourth Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security. We hope you will read the report sponsored by ID Experts that reveals some fascinating trends. Specifically, criminal attacks on healthcare systems have risen a startling 100 percent since we first conducted the study in 2010. This year, we found the number and size of data breaches has declined somewhat. Employee negligence is a major risk and is being fueled by BYOD.”

CRS – Encryption: Frequently Asked Questions, 10/05/2016, Congressional Research Service
Encryption is a process to secure information from unwanted access or use. Encryption uses the art of cryptography to change information which can be read (plaintext) and make it so that it cannot be read (ciphertext).

FTC v. LabMD ruling issued: FTC loses data security enforcement case, 11/13/2015, www.databreaches.net
In a data security enforcement action that some have characterized as a modern version of David vs. Goliath, David won today, and the FTC lost. It was an enforcement action that the FTC never should have commenced, as I’ve argued repeatedly, and today’s loss may actually make future enforcement actions more difficult for them as the standard for demonstrating likelihood of substantial injury has now been addressed in this ruling.

Wetware: The Major Data Security Threat You’ve Never Heard Of, 05/14/2015, www.databreaches.net
Adam Levin reports: For the first time, according to a recent study, criminal and state-sponsored hacks have surpassed human error as the leading cause of health care data breaches, and it could be costing the industry as much as $6 billion. With an average organization cost of $2.1 million per breach, the results of the study give rise to a question: How do you define human error?

What Is the Internet of Things?, 04/26/2015, www.bespacific.com
What Is the Internet of Things?, Mike Loukides and Jon Bruner, O’Reilly Media: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is a blending of software and hardware, introducing intelligence and connectedness to objects and adding physical endpoints to software.